Sep 3, 2026 · 27 min · 8 segments
There were thirteen United States — and to the rest of the world, there were thirteen nations. This is the story of what that cost. In 1785, pirates out of Algiers seized two American ships and…
A week later, the same thing happened to the Dolphin out of Philadelphia, 150 miles from the coast near Lisbon.
21 men on the ship, sailors, most of them ordinary men doing a job, carrying cargo across the Atlantic.
And they would remain slaves, hauling stone, wearing chains, worn down by labor and disease in the pens of the North African port for more than a decade.
Some of them never came home at all.
The captain of the Dolphin was a man named Richard O'Brien.
He would spend 11 years a slave in Algiers, and in those years he did something remarkable.
He learned his captors, studied their businesses of the ransom trade, and wrote a steady stream of letters to a government that could not free him, laying out what it would take to get its people back.
When peace was finally made years later, O'Brien walked out of captivity and became the United States consul at Algiers.
A former slave turned the diplomat of the country that had failed to ransom him.
And the problem of the Barbary pirates only grew.
As long as the American flag meant an easy prize and a fat ransom, more corsairs went hunting it and more American crews joined the ones already in chains.
What began with two ships in 1785 became, over the years that the United States remained helpless, more than a hundred American captives held in Algiers.
Each of them had a family somewhere on the American seaboard, writing to a Congress that could only write back its regrets.
There was no clearer measure of what the United States was and was not in these years than this.
Nothing at all.
The reason it could do nothing goes to the heart of what the Articles of Confederation were in those years.
It had won its independence and was discovering that independence by itself is not the same thing as being a nation.
That a flag and a name do not add up to a country if the country cannot act as one.
In the years after the revolution, the United States was learning, in one humiliation after another, a hard truth about the world, that a people who cannot act as a single nation will be treated by everyone else as no nation at all.
Why could the United States not get its own men out of Algiers? Two reasons, and each of them was fatal on its own.
During the colonial years, American shipping had sailed under the protection of the British Royal Navy, the most powerful fleet on earth, and they were under the king's protection.
A week later, the same thing happened to the Dolphin out of Philadelphia, 150 miles from the coast near Lisbon.
21 men on the ship, sailors, most of them ordinary men doing a job, carrying cargo across the Atlantic.
And they would remain slaves, hauling stone, wearing chains, worn down by labor and disease in the pens of the North African port for more than a decade.
Some of them never came home at all.
The captain of the Dolphin was a man named Richard O'Brien.
He would spend 11 years a slave in Algiers, and in those years he did something remarkable.
He learned his captors, studied their businesses of the ransom trade, and wrote a steady stream of letters to a government that could not free him, laying out what it would take to get its people back.
When peace was finally made years later, O'Brien walked out of captivity and became the United States consul at Algiers.
A former slave turned the diplomat of the country that had failed to ransom him.
And the problem of the Barbary pirates only grew.
As long as the American flag meant an easy prize and a fat ransom, more corsairs went hunting it and more American crews joined the ones already in chains.
What began with two ships in 1785 became, over the years that the United States remained helpless, more than a hundred American captives held in Algiers.
Each of them had a family somewhere on the American seaboard, writing to a Congress that could only write back its regrets.
There was no clearer measure of what the United States was and was not in these years than this.
Nothing at all.
The reason it could do nothing goes to the heart of what the Articles of Confederation were in those years.
It had won its independence and was discovering that independence by itself is not the same thing as being a nation.
That a flag and a name do not add up to a country if the country cannot act as one.
In the years after the revolution, the United States was learning, in one humiliation after another, a hard truth about the world, that a people who cannot act as a single nation will be treated by everyone else as no nation at all.
Why could the United States not get its own men out of Algiers? Two reasons, and each of them was fatal on its own.
During the colonial years, American shipping had sailed under the protection of the British Royal Navy, the most powerful fleet on earth, and they were under the king's protection.
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